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How Do You Lead Your Team?

This is a good question that new team leaders need to think about, and the most experienced managers should take time to reflect on.

You can manage tasks, systems and processes but you need to lead a team.

Because teams are made up of people, and they need and want your leadership.

How do you get them to be better than they think they can be?

How do we inspire the people around us?

How do we inspire ourselves to be better than we think we can be?

How do you lead your team?

Or as in the film Invictus Nelson Mandela played by Morgan Freeman asks Francois Pienaar played brilliantly by Matt Damon –

“What’s your philosophy on leadership? How do you inspire your team to do their best?”

If you have a few moments to hand, and you manage or lead a team, it’s not a bad question to ask yourself.

How do you inspire your team? Because they would prefer to be inspired than not.

How do you inspire yourself to greatness? How can you get others to give great things if you do not ask that of yourself?

How would your team describe your philosophy on leadership?

Where are the gaps between how you want to lead, and your team’s experience of your leadership style?

Not the leadership style on paper, but the one that emerges in day to day activity in the reality of your organisation.

Look at the video below it’s a poem which kept Nelson Mandela going while he was in prison, to help him to stand when all he wanted to do was to lie down.

The video below is the title trailer for the Six Nations Coverage for the BBC. If you don’t like sport, close your eyes and listen to the words, they are transcribed for you below.

And here are the words of the poem

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced or cried aloud
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloodied but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how straight the gait
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul

William Ernest Henley

How could you lead your team?

Learn from others about how they lead their teams.

This book is based on the leadership lessons from the New Zealand All Blacks, the Rugby Union world cup winners. You can see its’ influence in how many teams across all sports are being led and managed.

It’s a book that it fascinating, even if you’re not a rugby fan. It causes you to stop and think about your leadership of the people around you – it gets you to really explore the question – How do you lead your team?